I stand in a hole created by a giant’s footstep.  The crater 50 feet wide and 30 feet deep. It smells of dry grass. It feels of damp stone. The walls rise, cracked in near perfect hexagonal prisms, reminiscent of Easter Island, faces facing me with some unknowable wisdom in their eyes. Stone eyes. Nonexistent eyes. It evokes an awe, a godly air. Damp stone columns become temple pillars. Red Indian paintbrush becomes stained glass. This crater is not alone in the landscape, clusters dot it in the distance, witness to water’s power.

It is hard to imagine that a gigantic flood carved this place. Several great lakes worth of water rolled over this land, creating vortexes of compressed water, huge tornados with enough force to rip through rock. Where they touched down, however briefly, stone was flung aside and these craters were left behind, massive monuments to its force. How fast did the water rush over the landscape?  What obelisks did the flood crash into, creating the vortexes that drilled out the earth?  It is hard to imagine, yet somehow I can almost sense what I have in fact been told.  I see water rushing in, smashing and splashing angrily at the land.  This giant’s footprint still contains the force that created it. Somehow here, in damp stone and dry grass a tornado still coils.

You are in the hole.  Looking up at the cliffs rather than looking down from upon them. Gaze limited by stone walls, cracked, and segmented in squares and pentagons. Broken off rock piled halfway to the top at times, sagebrush craning for the sky while reaching for dampness with its roots. My attention is drawn here and then out again. The sky informed by a lens, the kind only a limiting enclosure of stone can create. Is it that it is a circle that evokes such sacredness from this place? It is sacred. A temple built like an Anasazi Kiva, a place to connect with the earth, and perhaps the tornado that still coils within.

This is a pothole, oddly named, found in Dry Falls National Park where I am. Why a pothole?  This hole is considerably larger than any pot I’ve seen. It is too large to be a pothole, too large to be anything save sacred in my eyes. This is a giant’s footprint. Here I am insignificant. Standing in the wake of a giant, awed by its vastness.

In the hole I am in awe.Around me I see rock that was carved out in an instant by a twister of bubbles, burrowing into solid stone. As I feel the rock with my hand I imagine the bubbles bursting – creating enough force to carve out the stone. Within the pothole, there is life flowing everywhere. There are grasses on the ground – lichen and moss, growing up the side of the walls.Trees sprout from the ground trying to reach the sky. I feel like I am in a giant planter pot and I am a bug looking up at the plants above

Smell: It smells of dust here. Dry dry dry, though the sky smells expectantly of rain.

Sight: Most of this place is sight, we are up about 40 feet and the view is amazing. To my right I can see green lake. From here it looks like it got some water from the rainy nights. It also seems to be brownish red, with white near the edges. Here on the butte there is lichen growing on the walls, which extend another 20 feet up from where we are, green in places, rusty in others, often a combination of the two.

Taste: The place tastes of untouched stone. A bit dusty, very very old. Somehow coming close enough to kiss a stone impresses it’s age upon me. This place tastes older than the oldest temple known to man.

Sound: Comparatively this place is noisy. Sound travels far here, and I can hear ducks quacking from the lake below, and other birds as well. Hawks, ravens, robins. Cars spin by on the highway, and even voices echo to find me here.

Green Lake did not strike me as particularly green, or at least not when we were there. Perhaps earlier in the year green graces the lake’s banks and waters, yet for us it was in mourning of summer’s passing. White mud stretching ice-like all across the dry bed. Unmistakably a lake, yet the oddest sight to behold. Our group walked for about a mile through the dry scablands, sun warming our heads. When we first arrived, we rest on a hill overlooking the white flat plain.  After much pulling grasses out of our socks, we went down to investigate.

The Lake’s surface seemed covered in powered sugar. I could see the tall yellow grasses surrounding and decorating the lake. The grass near the lake was green and as it receded, the color turned from a bright green to a beautiful golden yellow. When observing the lake I couldn’t help but feel like an explorer. Like I had discovered something important past compare.

Beyond the lake are cliffs, boulders piled halfway up its base, massive, majestic, more than a hundred feet tall. I could not capture all three sides in one tiny photograph as much as I tried, and it is the cliffs that make this place as much as the lake itself. Jagged shapes appear on the cliff face, the rock is too brittle to climb yet I cannot help but imagine doing so. I would stand at the top and shout. Voice echoing out across the wide winding plain, and down below absorbed as if by felt. It is quiet on the floor of the lake. I find my instincts piqued, my ear expectant of some danger in silence such as this.

I ended up exploring the lake with my feet. Barefoot I could feel the soft first  layer, white as snow yet warmer than what lay beneath. As I stepped down I could feel the moist gushy mud molding around my foot, squeezing through the small cracks between my toes. Mud almost up to my knee, I could now feel my feet getting the warmth sucked out from them, and the cold darkness started to creep in. Wanting to keep going forward I pulled my leg out of the abyss and back to the surface. Walking on the surface of that lake was fascinating. The only thing comparable to it is a giant ice cream cake.

Smell: On the surface is the smell of dry grass, yet beneath is a dampness. There is a sour damp smell when on the left side of the pothole or on the floor. I associate the smell with that of a swamp. This place is an interplay of hot and cold, dry and damp. The smell reflects that. Dry grass is most pogent yet beneath it lies damp moss, and the shadows beneath dark rocks.

Sight: In our area there are three potholes – The walls of the largest are jagged, but with an unmistakable pattern. Directly in front of me is a hexagonal cliff face where, if you look from above, you can see the way the rocks cracked, creating jutting angles of rock from below. In many areas the rock has crumbled creating slopes by which we can descend. Plants and trees come alive here, vibrant from the surrounding landscape in their greens yellows and reds.

Taste: The rock reminds me of Mayan temples, how I imagine they would taste against my tongue. Deep, dark, cold stone, like dark bitter gravy without the salt. The grass tastes like – well – grass, threads pressed lengthwise like dry straw.

Sound: Yesterday it was quiet, here resides silence. No sound permeates to the bottom of this pothole, and I find myself tapping just to make noise. My ears instinctively make their own sound, a high whine that might not be my own ears but rather the little bugs – gnats I think –  common to this place. As we move in we bring our own sound. The clicking of cameras, voices calling across the circle, the shuffle of feet, a cough, a clap. At one point we heard a frog croaking from the marshes nearby.

There was a chill in the air as the snake came out of a hole on the saddle.  The blood of the snake as cold as the earth beneath it.  The creature moved with a slowness that seemed as if the only thing moving it forward was the incline of the saddle.

The snake licked the air, searching for food or warmth, but warmth was hard to come by on the saddle, the season changing.  The snake found a shrub to twirl around, lifting its triangular head it lowered its body off the cliff of Umatilla.  It licked again furiously for some small taste of something, but no such luck.

A break in the ice, A rush of water too great to fathom, and now I share this place with a snake, slowing from the cold.  It is impossible, but it’s not.  I know something happened here that shaped this land in an outstanding way, but I can’t see it.  I see the snake, and the towering sides of the saddle, with their cracked surfaces. Umatilla rock built high above our camp and the lakes. These old brick like stones laid on top of each other, built too high to even make sense.

Slowly, almost infinitesimally, the snake slid in between the butte’s cracked rocks.  Disappearing under a cracked boulder that looked as if it had crushed itself under its own incredible weight.  The snake’s tail only rattled once as it hit a dried branch before it disappeared entirely from sight.